The Spider: The City That Paid to Die! (The Black Police Trilogy Part One) (1938): written by Norvell Page writing as Grant Stockbridge, in The Spider Vs. The Empire State: The Black Police Trilogy (2009):: Pulp-action-hero The Spider's crime-fighting disguise was so bizarre that it was only depicted on two of the covers of his 1930's and 1940's magazine. Basically, he dressed up to look like a hideous vampire. Most of the time, the cover artists depicted him as a generic masked crime-fighter, similar to The Phantom and a legion of others.
The Spider's adventures were no worse than the second-most apocalyptic pulp-hero sagas in history (Operator 5 may have been moreso, but it was set in a vague near-future America under siege by a host of foreign powers both real and imagined, which is to say both the Japanese military and The Purple Emperor laid waste to North America). The death toll was often in the millions, with New York often being depopulated in every issue by building-destroying death rays, plague-carrying vampire bats, and endless armies of criminals, madmen, and enemy fifth-columnists.
The City That Paid to Die! is the first part of what's now known as the Black Police Trilogy. In this first novel, fascist criminal forces basically trick New York's population into voting for their political proxies. That done, the forces of evil -- led by a mysterious Master -- enact legislation that allows them to terrorize and enslave the population of New York State. Even the federal government is helpless, we're told, because everything is legal and above-board!
Enter Richard Wentworth, The Spider, unmasked and forced to fight with his secret identity in shreds, his property and weapons seized, his friends and allies in perpetual mortal danger. But his ties to the benevolent inhabitants of Chinatown allow him to escape New York City just ahead of the forces of The Black Police (their uniform colours, not a racial bit, by the way).
In the wilderness of upstate New York, the Spider must build an army from those he's rescued from the murderous clutches of the New New York Order. But the Black Police number 100,000 or more dangerous criminals made legal by the machinations of their Master. Can the Spider prevail? Can he even survive? Two more novels tell the story. Recommended.
The Spider: The Spider At Bay (The Black Police Trilogy Part Two) (1938) by Norvell Page writing as Grant Stockbridge, in The Spider Vs. The Empire State: The Black Police Trilogy (2009): Richard Wentworth's battle against American fascism continues in the second part of what became known as The Black Police Trilogy.
While Wentworth normally fought weird crime as the pulo hero The Spider, here he repeatedly 'pretends' to be The Spider in order to rally the Resistance around him. That almost seems meta!
Things are really bad for freedom and justice in what's basically The Empire Strikes Back of the Black Police Trilogy. New York State is even more under the thumb of an evil mastermind known only as The Master.
The Master's puppet government, democratically elected with a spineless figurehead as governor, is free to murder and pillage the resources of the state because, um, State's Rights are really solid and binding in the world of The Spider. Even an unnamed FDR can't help! The Master's minions can even call in the National Guard to fight the Resistance!
As the second book in a trilogy, The Spider At Bay mainly exists to make things worse for The Spider and his ragtag group of helpers. This is very much New Deal pulp heroics, with our heroes battling a government that hates the poor and the working class and thrives on villainy. You know, like Trump! By the end, things look bad. Very bad. Is this the end of The Spider, err, Richard Wentworth? Recommended.
The Spider: Scourge Of the Black Legions (The Black Police Trilogy Part Three) (1938) by Norvell Page writing as Grant Stockbridge, in The Spider Vs. The Empire State: The Black Police Trilogy (2009): With the duly elected forces of villainy in New York State holding all the cards, Richard Wentworth/ The Spider must mount one last mission to save the state from The Master!
The Spider takes more physical punishment than any other pulp hero of the 1930's and 1940's. The Shadow, the Avenger, and Doc Savage were generally very little bloodied in the course of their adventures. That was the job of their subordinates -- to get knocked out and beaten up.
The Spider is basically a cross between Ash from Evil Dead 2 and Leonardo DiCaprio's titular character in The Revenant. He gets shot, shot again, beaten, stabbed... really, he's Wolverine without the mutant healing factor. It's sort of exhilarating to read the adventures of a pulp hero whose main quality is perseverance. Well, and a love of heating up the spider insignia on his ring with a cigarette lighter so he can brand captured criminals on the forehead with the Sign of the Spider!
So many questions...
- Will The Spider stop The Master?
- Will the federal government get off its ass and do something?
- Will we learn the true identity of The Master and perhaps feel a bit underwhelmed at the revelation?
- Will a Bad Twin become a Good Twin because of the love of a good woman?
- Will completely insane death traps like a giant wood-chipper made to chip up humans be put into play?
- Will The Spider save the dam in Pennsylvania from being blown up by the Master as a way to divert federal attention away from New York State?
- Will anyone realize that The Spider and Richard Wentworth really are the same person?
So many questions... answered in The Scourge of the Black Legions! Highly recommended.
Detectives, Inc. by Don McGregor, Marshall Rogers and Gene Colan (Material from the 1970's and 1980's; this IDW edition 2009): IDW is really winning my heart with its reprints of great comics from the 1980's and 1990's.
This B&W collection of writer McGregor's Detectives, Inc. comic stories comes along with several prose pieces on the genesis of the detective comic, along with a piece on the filming of the Detectives, Inc. movie. My only caveat about the volume is that it's unfortunate that it couldn't be reprinted in a larger format -- the hyper-detailed art of Marshall Rogers on "A Remembrance of Threatening Green" originally appeared in a larger album size, and things do get a little squinty at times.
Still, this is a tremendous achievement both in writing and art. The world of McGregor's private detectives, Rainier and Dennings, gets the hypercrisp, hyper-detailed treatment from Marshall Rogers (best known for his Batman work in the 1970's), and the moodier, more humanistic approach from Gene Colan (best known for Tomb of Dracula and about a dozen other books).
Both art styles work, and both look great in black and white. Indeed, this may be the late Rogers' greatest work. The attention to detail is stunning, and Rogers experiments with some really fascinating one and two-page designs.
Private detectives aren't all that common in comic books unless they wear costumes or have occult powers. Rainier and Dennings remind me a lot of revisionist 70's PIs from the movies -- not so much Jake Gittes in Chinatown, as Rainier and Dennings are less cynical than Robert Towne's PI, but more the characters we see in films like Night Moves (with Gene Hackman on the case) and Cutter's Way (in which non-PI's John Heard and Jeff Bridges try to solve a case). They're battered and bruised sometimes, emotionally as well as physically, but they stay on the case.
McGregor invests his characters with a lot of heart -- he's one of the great comic book writers in terms of creating sympathy and empathy, at creating plausibly flawed and self-doubting protagonists, and at incorporating both sex and romance into a comic book without being prurient or exploitative. Highly recommended.
Keanu (2016): written by Jordan Peele, Alex Rubens, and Jamie Schaecher; directed by Peter Atencio; starring Jordan Peele (Rell/ Oil), Keegan-Michael Key (Clarence/ Smoke), Tiffany Haddish (Hi-C), Method Man (Cheddar), Nia Long (Hannah), and Keanu Reeves (Voice of Keanu):
Fun action comedy nods a lot to such movies from the 1970's and 1980's (especially anything starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder). Key and Peele play cousins Clarence and Rell, suburban blerds who are forced into action to save Rell's kitten Keanu, kidnapped by gangsters. Knowledge of George Michael and the conventions of action-comedy capers are probably necessary to derive something like full enjoyment out of Keanu, which sometimes veers too much into 'serious' territory. Recommended.
The Big Sleep (1939: Philip Marlowe#1) by Raymond Chandler: Worried that in seeing the great Howard Hawks adaptation of The Big Sleep you've ruined yourself for the novel? Worry not! The novel diverges enough by page 50 or so that it's pretty much a different story than the movie.
Of course, it's also a lot more explicitly bigoted and homophobic than the movie, so there's that too. Get through that stuff and you've got a superior hard-boiled detective novel, one which had a psychological and stylistic depth that would influence hard-boiled fiction ever after.
This is the first novel-length adventure of Chandler's Philip Marlowe, the Los Angeles PI with a heart of gold. Well, gold alloyed with cynicism and pithy, pungent comments on The Way Things Are. Chandler's Marlowe arrives here pretty much entirely formed. He'll stay on a case if he thinks justice needs to be done, regardless of what a client wants. He likes chess, whiskey, and pondering the dusty nature of his office.
The written word in America 1939 had a bit more freedom than Hollywood movies in 1946, so certain portions of the plot are simply a bit more explicit when it comes to the pornography ring that drives part of the action. This also leads to the bigotry and homophobia becoming more explicit -- Bogart couldn't utter the opinion that "a pansy has no iron in his bones" in a movie, but Marlowe sure can, and does, in the novel. Hoo ha!
Nonetheless, the novel still reads with a surprising amount of stylistic freshness. Chandler was not better than all those who would follow him into the hardboiled world he remade, but he certainly was better than most -- and better than Dashiell Hammett, who was the epitome of the hardboiled writer before Chandler. Highly recommended.
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972): written and directed by Werner Herzog; starring Klaus Kinski (Aguirre) and Del Negro (Brother Gaspar/Narrator): As the IMDB tells us, "A few decades after the destruction of the Inca empire, a Spanish expedition leaves the mountains of Peru and goes down the Amazon river in search of gold and wealth." The time is about 1560. And the Spaniards have brought their heart of darkness with them.
Werner Herzog is in peak form here with this story of human evil and the sublime and haunting jungle which swallows anything it wants to swallow. Klaus Kinski's greedy, murderous, deluded soldier dreams of claiming all of the land around him for himself. In a way, he does. Well, him and a bunch of cheeky monkeys.
Human perversity ends up dwarfed by the jungle, never more threatening than when everything goes silent and a barrage of arrows kills off members of Aguirre's party. Again and again.
The Catholic monk who serves as the film's narrator dreams of conquest as well -- spiritual conquest. Well, and maybe a gold cross for himself. Aguirre searches for El Dorado, the legendary Lost City of Gold of the Americas. He's going down the Amazon to find it. Silly rabbit -- as we learned from Nick Cage's National Treasure movies, El Dorado is located beneath Mt. Rushmore!
Klaus Kinski is superb -- craven and menacing and delusional. The rest of the performances are solid. Shots of the party on their makeshift raft built to hold 20 people and a horse repeatedly surprise as the raft drifts in and out of encounters with the dangers of the river and the shore. An influence on pretty much every horrifying journey in movies ever after -- most notably Apocalypse Now -- Aguirre, The Wrath of God moves towards a climax that sums itself up with its final scene. Highly recommended.
Burden of Dreams (1989): directed by Les Blank: Documentarian Les Blank managed to make a great documentary about the filming of a great movie -- Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo. One can enjoy this without having watched Herzog and Klaus Kinski's second journey into the Amazon jungles, but you probably should if you haven't already.
Herzog's often loopy monologues are the highlight of the movie, which also sometimes offers surprising moments of humour. I'm not sure there's any better example of why one should never go to the movies for history than this documentary. The 'real' story of Fitzcarraldo involved the titular character moving a 30-ton steamship in 19 pieces overland from one bend of a river to another. Herzog inflated that to 300 tons, moved the whole steamship at once, and constantly imperiled everyone on the film pretty much all the time with increasingly arcane and difficult business.
But for all his faults, Herzog let this documentary show him in all his Faustian strangeness. Fascinating, involving stuff. Highly recommended.
Bright (2017): written by Max Landis; directed by David Ayer; starring Will Smith (Ward), Joel Edgerton (Jakoby), Noomi Rapace (Leilah), and Lucy Fry (Tikka): The most expensive Netflix movie ever at about $95 million, Bright actually entertains. A mash-up of buddy-cop movie and urban fantasy, Bright teams grumpy LAPD patrolman Will Smith with perennially upbeat partner Joel Edgerton, in heavy make-up as the first Orc to ever serve on the LAPD.
Yep, Orc, as in Lord of the Rings. Like the Warcraft series, Bright gets to use the term 'Orc' because it's not peculiar to Tolkien -- he borrowed the term from an Old English word for 'whale.' But the backstory of Bright steers very close to Tolkien. How would the Orcs and Elves of Tolkien's time operate in society today if the battle against The Dark Lord really happened 2000 years ago?
Well, the Elves are the 1%, the Orcs are a despised underclass because of their long-ago pact with the Dark Lord ("We chose the wrong side," Smith's partner tells him, "and we've been paying for it ever since.") Of course, the Dark Lord was an Elf, not an Orc, but the Elves live the high life, with humanity beneath them on the social ladder and orcs below that. Tinkerbell-like fairies mainly make things interesting at bird feeders. So it goes.
Will Smith and Edgerton propel the movie through its rough spots with their charisma and occasionally hilarious back-and-forth. I probably liked Bright a lot more than I should have. Oh well. Recommended.
